The Greatest Movie Ever Sold (2011)

Trailer: Official trailer, Sony Pictures Classics.

What it is

Spurlock sets out to finance the film by selling placement within it, and documents every pitch. Brands appear as sponsors of a film about the practice of sponsoring films. The formal title carries a sponsor name, which is the joke.

What it gets right about the trade

The meetings are real and they are the film. We see brand managers and their agencies deciding what they will and will not be associated with, in their own words, with the camera running. Nothing else in this section gets that access.

It demonstrates how much control sponsors expect. The negotiations are mostly about approval rights, context and adjacency, not about money. That is accurate and it is the part most people outside the industry get wrong.

The rejections are more informative than the acceptances. Watching brands decline because the association is slightly wrong is a better education in brand safety than any policy document.

What it gets wrong

The reflexive structure eats the subject. By the end it is a film about making the film, and the actual question, what placement does to audiences and whether it works, is barely examined.

There is no evidence in it. We learn a great deal about how deals are made and nothing about whether placement shifts preference, which is the only question a marketer would want answered.

It is also, unavoidably, a stunt. Spurlock’s method produces access and limits depth, and this one leans further toward the stunt than his earlier work.

The one part worth showing a team

Any of the pitch meetings, chosen at random.

Watch a brand team articulate what they are protecting. That articulation, unrehearsed and commercially real, is the closest thing to a brand strategy most companies ever produce, and it only comes out when someone asks them to approve an association.

Then ask your own team: what would we refuse, and why? Most cannot answer.

If you run the company rather than the marketing

The useful exercise from this film costs an hour.

Ask your marketing lead what partnership or association your company would turn down, and why. Not in principle, specifically: which sponsorship, which co-marketing deal, which publication.

If the answer is vague, you do not have a brand position, you have a logo and a colour. The brands in this film could all answer instantly, because they had been forced to decide in advance, and the deciding is the work.

The second observation worth taking: the negotiations were about control and context, not price. When your company is the one being associated with something, the same should be true. If a partnership conversation in your business is only about cost, somebody has skipped the part that matters.